Van der Graaf Generator committed several of prog-rock's
cardinal sins and confirmed some of its dodgier stereotypes:
they mixed jazz, rock, classical and even operatic
sensibilities; they assembled lengthy, often multi-partite,
occasionally bombastic songs; they oozed musicianship,
delighting in complex time signatures and tricky chord
changes; their lyrics were literate, philosophical and
sometimes utterly ridiculous; they were educated, middle
class and very English. However, to dismiss Van der Graaf
Generator along with rock's great scapegoat genre would be
to misrepresent them and to gloss over the traits that made
them a singular presence on the '70s art-rock landscape.

The band's instrumental roster was unconventional. Its
most storied line-up (1970-'76) featured organ, drums and
sax but practically no guitar or bass. Guest Robert Fripp
contributed the former on a couple of records, while
cathedral-trained organist Hugh Banton's bass pedals took
care of the bottom-end. Indeed, Banton conspired with
drummer Guy Evans' earth-moving beat to endow Van der Graaf
Generator's sound with overwhelming heft, and his
extensively customized organs garnered mythical status.
Loaded down and fleshed out with all sorts of noise-warping
devices, they hit frequencies so low as to rearrange
furniture and even topple walls (or so apocryphal stories
had it). In the absence of a guitar-slinger,
saxophonist/flautist David Jackson approached his
instruments with rock'n'roll panache and free-jazz
inventiveness, running his horns through a labyrinth of
effects. He was even known to blow two of them
simultaneously, as Rahsaan Roland Kirk did. And as if that
weren't enough, Peter Hammill was a frontman possessed of one of
rock's more distinctive and challenging voices. In fact, the
Jesuit-educated ex-boy chorister could sing as if he
actually were possessed. His voice was generally the
single
component that decided whether listeners loved the band or
hated it.

The group was infamously volatile, splitting up more than
once (including prior to the release of its debut album).
The need to push to extremes and court implosion was,
paradoxically, an essential condition and the crux of its
aesthetic, which veered from mellow pastorality one moment
to noise-terror in extremis the next, particularly in
concert, where improvisation and sonic anarchy went hand in
hand. But although that dangerous energy proved to be Van
der Graaf Generator's undoing  driving bandmembers to
take breaks from participation  it was also crucial to
the group's continuity: the moments of rupture in turn
revitalized the band and spawned reinventions of its sound.
A disregard for longevity, compromise and commercial
success, as well as a chaotic, self-destructive streak, gave
the group something in common with adventurous punks and
post-punks. Ironically, while new wave's Year Zero ethos and
its rejection of musicianship, artistry and complexity might
have seen Van der Graaf Generator first up against the wall
in 1976, they (along with Can, Neu! and several others)
struck a chord with figures like Mark E. Smith, Howard
Devoto and John Lydon.

Hammill and fellow Manchester University student Chris
Judge Smith first brought Van der Graaf Generator to life in
November 1967. In the best Spinal Tap tradition, the
misspelling of physicist Robert J. van de Graaff's name was
unintentional. The maiden line-up was an ominously unstable
unit that managed only one performance  for which the
band was almost named Zeiss Manifold and the Shrieking
Plasma Exudation. By February 1968, it was a trio of Hammill
(guitar/vocals), Judge Smith (drums) and Nick Pearne (organ)
plus a pair of dancers (it was the '60s, after all).
As a duo, Hammill and Judge Smith opened for Tyrannosaurus
Rex in Manchester and, using TV sets as amplifiers, the
fledgling Van der Graaf Generator recorded a demo that
helped secure them a contract with Mercury. Hammill and
Judge Smith subsequently left for London, where Mercury sent
them into the studio and offered staff producer Quincy Jones
a chance to work with them. Jones dropped in to check out
the band, but what might have been one of rock's odder
collaborations didn't come to pass. With Pearne remaining in
Manchester, Hugh Banton was recruited to play organ, former
Koobas bassist Keith Ellis joined, and Tony Stratton-Smith,
who would soon launch The Famous Charisma Label, agreed to
manage the band. A four-piece cut a debut single: a
hippy-dippy ballad titled "People You Were Going To."
Although the rousing sword-and-sorcery B-side, "Firebrand,"
didn't necessarily travel any better beyond the '60s, it was
more intriguing: here Hammill reworks part of the old
Icelandic saga The Story of Burnt Njal and Judge
Smith makes his first and last (and frankly bizarre) vocal
contribution to Van der Graaf Generator's recorded oeuvre.
Drummer Guy Evans joined, and this version of the band
managed a session for John Peel's nascent BBC Radio program,
Top Gear, in November 1968; Judge Smith quit shortly
after. The band gigged steadily through early '69, opening
for Jimi Hendrix at the Royal Albert Hall and appearing on a
bill with Pink Floyd and Fleetwood Mac. But then their
equipment was stolen  something that would become a
recurring theme  and Van der Graaf Generator disbanded
in June 1969.

A couple of months later, Hammill, Banton, Ellis and
Evans gathered to make The Aerosol Grey Machine as
Hammill's solo debut. Following some contractual wrangling
with Mercury, however, the record came out under the group's
name. Several tracks have a singer-songwriter feel that
anticipates Hammill's eventual solo work, particularly
"Running Back," the two-part "Orthenthian St." and the
wah-wah-infused psychedelic ballad "Afterwards." Overall,
The Aerosol Grey Machine is very much of its time,
from the title track's Bonzo-esque jingle to "Aquarian," an
anthemic, '60s zeitgeist sing-along: "We are riding on
rainbows and happy today / Now we move to the sun in every
direction / We are cloaked in veils of mystic protection /
Joking a lot, smoking or not / Floating our yacht off to
freedom / Voting to be Aquarian!" Peace and love
notwithstanding, there are strong portents of the direction
Van der Graaf Generator would take. The inexplicably
compelling "Necromancer" heads into territory that would
soon be universally known as "progressive." Amid the song's
stop-start rhythmic patterns and melodramatic flourishes,
Hammill waxes magickal, although the overriding Dungeons
and Dragons tenor of his lyrics makes it hard to
suppress a snigger. Elsewhere, the group abandons the
oneiric psychedelia of "Aquarian" for some decidedly
nightmarish trips. A case in point is "Octopus," part love
song, part sub-aquatic horror story ("I must endure your /
Red-copper hair screaming like a water-baby / Black eyes
stare from my ceiling / You who I now truly know"). While
the album has a measure of tranquility, "Octopus" is a
harbinger of the tougher, chaotic edge that would come to
characterize VdGG, especially in live performance. Crucial
in that regard is Banton: on "Octopus" he asserts himself as
distinctively as peers like Keith Emerson, Jon Lord and Mike
Ratledge, his waves of surging organ leaving Hammill
consumed in the beloved's tentacular grip. (This song makes
for an interesting companion piece to "Octopus" by
contemporaneous psychedelic unknowns JP Sunshine, who
celebrated the "mystical monster marine" and its "deadly
erotic embrace," albeit in a more whimsical mode.) Although
The Aerosol Grey Machine is Van der Graaf Generator's
least enduring record, many of the band's trademark
ingredients were established here.

Late 1969 brought a new lineup, including sax player
David Jackson, late of Chris Judge Smith's new outfit,
Heebalob, and replacing Ellis with 17-year-old Nic Potter,
who had enjoyed a brief stint in the Misunderstood. Having
failed to secure a record deal for the band, manager
Stratton-Smith decided to release it himself on Charisma,
which would become one of English prog rock's
stately homes. Recorded in December 1969, The Least We
Can Do Is Wave to Each Other was one of the label's
first albums. With Jackson on board, the band's signature
sound began to coalesce; the ominous opener "Darkness
(11/11)" (dealing obliquely with the 11th-century English
anti-Norman resistance figure Hereward the Wake) is a
blueprint for the band's finest moments in the coming years:
shot through with Jackson's braying horns, the vibe is
altogether darker and heavier than anything on the debut
album. And while The Aerosol Grey Machine certainly
foregrounded Hammill's unique voice, the singer's full
idiosyncrasy now declares
itself in unsettling shifts from warm, reassuring tones to
the brink of carpet-biting madness. Especially striking is
Hammill's ability, even in the grip of these wild swings, to
sustain the sort of precise, crisp enunciation worthy of a
1950s English public school headmaster or a vintage BBC
announcer. (Perhaps this accounts for the band's
considerable popularity with non-native-English speakers.)
Another standout is the historical-theological behemoth
"White Hammer," which begins with Hammill in professor of
canon law mode, delivering the sort of lyrics that only he
could get away with: "In the year 1486 the Malleus
first appeared / Designed to kill all witchcraft and end the
papal fears / Prescribing tortures to kill the Black Arts /
And the Hammer struck hard." The song was cut from the same
occult cloth as "Necromancer," but, somehow, combined
totally loony bombast and genuine menace, building from an
austere churchy introduction to a dissonant, truly
disquieting climax. The 11-minute "After the Flood" displays
similarly noisy inclinations, morphing from sprightly
folk-rock to metal machine music, with Hammill's Dalek-like
voice threatening "total annihilation." These numbers
emphasize an evolution in the band's sound: the tumultuous
tendencies (rooted primarily in Banton's increasingly
customized organ and Jackson's distorted sax) that dominated
the improvised sections of their live performances were now
manifesting themselves in the studio. Although The Least
We Can Do Is Wave to Each Other pretty much exorcised
any remaining residue of '60s fun and games, "Out of My
Book" is lighter, and there is an elegy of sorts to the era
on the sublime "Refugees," which exudes a beautiful pastoral
aura, thanks to its cocoon of organ and cello.

A cursory glance at H to He Who Am the Only One
suggests that Van der Graaf Generator had become the
quintessence of
prog: the songs are longer and fewer, prone to elaborate
subdivided titles; the cover painting looks like a pair of
enormous clockwork testicles orbiting the earth; the liner
notes are prefaced by a chemical equation involving Hydrogen
(H) and Helium (He), apparently an explanation of life, the
universe and everything else. That said, H to He Who Am
the Only One also proved that Van der Graaf Generator
wasn't just
any prog band. Beyond the virtuosity, the literary
sensibility, the allusions to classical music, the jazz
nuances and an appreciation of the difference between 13/8
and 15/8 time, they stood apart from most of their
contemporaries. What distinguished Van der Graaf Generator
is made crystal clear on this record. There's a dark, almost
proto-goth flavor and, most importantly, a punk attitude
avant la lettre: a focus on the here-and-now, during
which they wanted to play as loudly and anarchically as
possible. Unlike most of their fellow-travelers, they were
capable of rocking with a dangerous intensity matched only
by King Crimson. Indeed, Fripp brings some breathtakingly
dexterous, liquid guitar to "The Emperor in His War-Room," a
cerebral "War Pigs" in diptych form. The colossal "Pioneers
Over C" is a foray into metaphysical science fiction in
which Hammill's ontological concerns take on cosmic
proportions. This is a thinking-man's "Space Oddity": "Left
the earth in 1983, fingers groping for the galaxies," sings
Hammill at the outset, only to end up adrift like Major Tom,
after digesting Leibniz, Kant, Mach and Einstein: "Well now,
where is the time, and who the hell am I / Here floating in
an aimless way? / I am now quite alone, part of a vacant
time-zone / Here floating in the void / Only dimly aware of
existence / A dimly existing awareness." The highlight,
"Killers," brings things back down to Earth, or more
accurately underwater, assembling a juggernaut of
sub-aquatic existential and familial angst that recasts
Hobbes' "man to man is an arrant wolf" as man to man is an
arrant fish: "On a black day, in a black month, at the black
bottom of the sea / Your mother gave birth to you and died
immediately / 'Cos you can't have two killers living in the
same pad / And when your mother knew that her time had come
/ She was really rather glad." In true Van der Graaf
Generator style, this is absurd but totally gripping. Having
played on three of H to He Who Am the Only One's five
tracks, Potter became genuinely alarmed about an aura of
malevolence surrounding the band and quit. With the album
complete, he was not
replaced, leaving Banton to assume Potter's duties using pedals.
The group's classic incarnation as a guitar- and bass-less
rock group was in place.

In January 1971, on the heels of H to He Who Am the
Only One, Van der Graaf Generator boarded a bus with
labelmates
Genesis and Lindisfarne for the Six Bob Tour of England and
Wales. Another Charisma package excursion with Audience and
Jackson Heights (in a pink bus) took them across the
Channel, where they played to largely bemused Germans and
Swiss. By July, sessions had begun for Pawn Hearts.
(As Guy Evans famously observed, "I liked the way things
were going. We'd actually gone mad by then.") The image on
the album's original inner sleeve is a hideous Technicolor
nightmare of four weirdos in an English country garden
offering Nazi salutes. Whatever madness was afoot, it
definitely made its creative presence felt on Pawn
Hearts, which proved to be the group's most fully
realized work thus far. Each of its three tracks embodied
the Van der Graaf Generator dialectical world view,
embracing extremes, working through cycles of
thesis-antithesis-synthesis and, ultimately, pulling off
impossibly grand statements. These numbers do crease
slightly under the weight of pretension and are almost
consumed by their own inner-destructive energies; however,
they emerge whole and triumphant. While so much prog was
purely cerebral, Van der Graaf Generator combined braininess
with an intense and sometimes exhausting viscerality. With
the sense that the wheels were often close to coming off,
that is what made the band so absorbing. Comprising ten
separately named sections, the side-long "A Plague of
Lighthouse Keepers" encapsulates this feeling. The parts
(some of which border on free-jazz freak-out) threaten to
overwhelm the whole, but by the end, the whole wins out by a
hair. This counterpart to Genesis' "Supper's Ready" is
a nautically themed existential meditation on man
hopelessly adrift on the sea of meaning  the
lighthouse keeper as the universal embodiment of alienated
man. Hammill goes to the edge, as usual: "The maelstrom of
my memory / Is a vampire and it feeds on me / Now,
staggering madly, over the brink I fall." Nevertheless, the
track concludes on a note of reasonably optimistic
acquiescence and knowledge: "It doesn't feel so very bad
now, I think the end is the start," muses Hammill, recalling
T.S. Eliot's conclusion of "Little Gidding." (Hammill seems
to draw also on Eliot's "The Waste Land" here.) The two
other, comparatively more compact, tracks here offer equally
vexed visions of the human condition. Speeding up and
slowing down and punctuated with harsh-soft passages,
"Lemmings (Including Cog)" rehashes the idea of human beings
as members of the Arvicolinae subfamily in a world of
soulless mechanization, culminating in a Beckettian
"I-can't-go-on-I'll-go-on" moment of resignation: "What
choice is there left but to try?" Progressing from an almost
hymnal intro, with Hammill's voice accompanied by piano, to
a manic climax and back, "Man-Erg" reflects on the human
capacity for evil: "I'm just a man, and killers, angels, all
are these / Dictators, saviours, refugees." Pawn
Hearts topped the album chart in Italy and was more or
less ignored everywhere else. The group split up, again.

With the band out of commission, Hammill forged ahead
with his increasingly prolific solo career. Banton, Evans
and Jackson were less active, joining forces to record
The Long Hello. In October 1974, the four came back
together to play on Hammill's proto-punk record, Nadir's
Big Chance, and agreed to reform Van der Graaf
Generator. Following a spring 1975 comeback tour, the band
started work on Godbluff. The opportunity to
road-test and rehearse the majority of the new material
before entering the studio helped to head off the problems
that had dogged Pawn Hearts  the
seat-of-the-pants writing and recording of "A Plague of
Lighthouse Keepers" had been a major factor contributing to
the group's burnout. Echoing the mood of "Lemmings," on
Godbluff's opener, "The Undercover Man," Hammill
adopts an attitude of resigned persistence ("You ask, in
uncertain voice, what you should do / As if there were a
choice but to carry on"), and while his delivery is
comparatively restrained here, it's no less compelling. That
dynamic extends to the overall sound of Godbluff,
which marks a departure from the preceding album: the
record's four tracks are familiarly lengthy, and baroque,
but they're focused, rather than sprawling and overwhelming;
while reining in its more unhinged inclinations, the band
never forfeits intensity or urgency. In contrast with the
prosaic contemplation of the misery of the human condition
that characterizes "The Undercover Man," the two strongest
tracks find Hammill staging his perennial existential
struggles as life-versus-death psychodramas, set in
forbidding pseudo-medieval environments. The weighty
"Scorched Earth" taps back into the band's menacing,
cacophonic tendencies and gallops to a feedback-addled
conclusion as the song's protagonist flees for his life.
"Arrow" starts out like something from the dark, brooding
depths, but Banton's bass, Jackson's electrified squall and
Evans' nodding beat together shape a funky groove that
gradually coalesces into the song itself, with Hammill's
stentorian voice leading another epic charge. The song's
atmospheric rendering of a medieval warrior fleeing for his
life doesn't end well for its hero who, after a desperate
chase and a failed attempt at gaining sanctuary, reflects,
"How strange my body feels, impaled upon the arrow." For all
the churning turmoil, Godbluff isn't without levity:
witness the completely random, supremely cheesy Latin
cocktail interlude during "The Sleepwalkers."

Still Life has a degree of continuity from its
predecessor (in fact, two of its six tracks were actually
recorded during the Godbluff sessions). The changes
aren't dramatic, yet there's definitely a sense of
progression here as the band evens out its spikier edges and
smoothes down some of its jarring rhythmic patterns for
music that is more fluid but no less powerful. While the
anthemic "Pilgrims" and the sedate "My Room" revisit some of
the previously charted peaceful, pastoral territory, "La
Rossa" epitomizes Still Life's fresh sonic dimension
and finds the band exploring a different modus operandi.
Sudden changes were a Van der Graaf Generator staple, but
this track seamlessly combines diametrically opposed moods,
moving almost imperceptibly from soft to hard, light to
heavy, quiet to loud. Hammill, who here paints himself in an
unflattering light as a frantic organ-grinder's monkey,
still seems to be in the thrall of the watery femme fatale
who made his life such a misery on the earlier "Octopus."
The song is a textbook case of the male psyche's
simultaneous fear of, and desire for, engulfment by the
feminine: "Take me, take me now and hold me / Deep inside
your ocean body," Hammill pleads, "Wash me as some flotsam
to the shore / There leave me lying evermore! / Drown me,
drown me now and hold me down / Before your naked hunger."
No Van der Graaf Generator record would be complete
without a couple of lengthy philosophical treatises, and
Still Life doesn't disappoint. The title track
ponders a future time without physical decline and death.
For some, such a vision might provide brighter lyrical
possibilities, but in Hammill's hands the prospect of
immortality, of course, becomes the stuff of ennui and
eternal torture. On "Childlike Faith in Childhood's End," he
launches into another meditation on the meaning of life,
returning to by-now familiar themes and dilemmas and coming
up with a familiar response: "Existence is a stage on which
we pass / A sleepwalk trick for mind and heart / It's
hopeless, I know, but onward I must go." Overall, Still
Life isn't perhaps quite as immediate in its impact as
Pawn Hearts, but it still ranks as a career
highlight.

Only a month after the release of Still Life, Van
der Graaf Generator found the time to make World
Record. But with three albums in a year, they lost the
balance
between quantity and quality. The creative momentum that
followed the group's reunion was flagging, and the emergence
of commercial aspirations was no antidote. After making
precious few concessions to mainstream sensibilities for so
long, World Record suggests a band with an eye on
actually selling records. Van der Graaf Generator had previously
progressed idiosyncratically, never placing the onus on
breaking radically new stylistic ground with each release
but, rather, emphasizing the process itself and challenging
themselves to push their own limits. World Record
shows some stylistic departures, but trades immediacy and
intensity for a comfortable, safer sound. Although a couple
of tracks rock reasonably hard, they're ultimately
unsatisfying precisely because the band is working so
obviously and self-consciously within a more conventional
rock idiom. On "A Place to Survive," as Banton, Jackson and
Evans establish a busy, vaguely funky structure, Hammill
takes an unusually optimistic path, which doesn't become
him. The lyrics are earnest and trite: melodramatic as
opposed to dramatic, they come across not unlike a fusion of
"You'll Never Walk Alone" and "Climb Every Mountain."
Similarly, the placid "Masks" falls into awkward
cliché: social interaction as role-playing. However,
it's business as usual on the harsher "When She Comes,"
where Hammill revisits his ambivalent relationship with
women, name-checking William Blake, Edward Burne-Jones and
Edgar Allan Poe in the process. The album runs aground with
the 21-minute "Meurglys III (The Songwriter's Guild)," which
rarely sounds like more than an extended jam and even lapses
into an unprecedented attack of awful would-be reggae. To
make matters worse, Hammill hits a lyrical nadir in the
song, declaring that his only true friend is his guitar. The
hymnal, valedictory "Wondering" is some compensation, but
not enough.

A shake-up for The Quiet Zone/The Pleasure Dome
significantly altered the group's structural dynamics and
initiated a new creative phase. When Banton and Jackson
left, Hammill and Evans did not replace the pair. Having
abbreviated the band name to (the familiar) Van der Graaf in
deference to the departed duo, they excised the trademark
sax-and-organ emphasis (although Jackson hung around just
long enough to play on a few tracks), brought in violinist
Graham Smith and lured Nic Potter back. While Smith's string
enhancements and Potter's supple, fuzzy bass add a bold new
dimension, the contributions of the two remaining members
also underwent some changes. Evans drums with renewed vim
and vigor and Hammill expands his guitar work, cranking up
the volume and bringing a harsher, more visceral quality to
his playing. Crucially, Hammill emerges as the focal point
of the music. With Banton absent, he is responsible for the
harmonic framework and the stylistic difference from
World Record to The Quiet Zone/The Pleasure
Dome is pronounced. Just as parts of Godbluff and
Hammill's Nadir's Big Chance anticipated the musical
anarchy on the horizon in the mid-'70s, The Quiet
Zone/The Pleasure Dome is a record that, in its own way,
resonates with the upheavals wrought by punk. The doomy,
overwhelming blocs of organ and the jazz inflections of
classic Van der Graaf Generator give way to a pared-down,
raw-and-jagged approach; while the band had never wanted for
energy, the new version found another gear, its rhythmic
changes and melodic shifts spikier and
speedier. Hammill's lyrical preoccupations here fall into
two familiar categories: tortured relationships and
existential ruminations. The songs are grouped more or less
accordingly on the original vinyl sides, respectively titled
"The Quiet Zone" and "The Pleasure Dome." The sinewy,
elastic "Lizard Play" sees Hammill get down and dirty with
an "Iguana lady," whereas "The Siren Song" has him,
predictably enough, "lashed to the mast" in an effort to
resist "the sweet kisses of addiction" and a laugh that
"chills my marrow." On "Last Frame," distorted guitar and
eerie violin duke it out as Hammill metaphorically ensconces
himself in a darkroom, weaving a sorry tale of lost love and
photography, and eventually blurring the line between pathos
and pathetic as he wistfully concludes, "I only have a
negative of you." Hammill returns to questions of life's
meaning and purpose on the "Pleasure Dome" section of the
record, opening with "The Wave," a slow, meditative
piano-based ballad. However, not all of his metaphysical
explorations are couched in such reflective arrangements: on
the standout "Cat's Eye/Yellow Fever (Running)," for
instance, the mood is fraught and frantic as overdubbed
voices collide, violins whip up a storm and staccato
percussion stabs; "Chemical World" features an intense,
angular soundscape of frenzied violin and heavy fuzz-bass.
While The Quiet Zone/The Pleasure Dome could never be
mistaken for punk rock, the band certainly aligns itself
ideologically with the Class of '77. There's a clear sense
in which Van der Graaf have had their own minor Year Zero.
They've blown out the cobwebs and are prepared to move
forward  in stark contrast with many of their less
adventurous prog peers, who were left stranded on the other
side of punk's gaping divide.

Cellist/keyboard player Charles Dickie joined after the
completion of The Quiet Zone/The Pleasure Dome. If
the idea was that a new component would take the edge off a
little, as the excellent live album Vital
demonstrates, that didn't exactly work. Recorded at London's
Marquee Club, Van der Graaf is leaner than in previous
incarnations but no less hungry, noisy or potent. Ads for
the release called it "The Most Extreme Live Album" by "The
Most Extreme Band in the World." Hyperbole aside, it is a
vivid document of a group that was already disbanded.
Whereas live albums by most '70s bands at the end of their
careers tend to be pitiful monuments to decadence,
self-indulgence and irrelevance, Vital is none of the
above. (It was surprising that a group that reveled in live
performance would wait so long to release a live album, and
then only as an epitaph.) Sounding as if the group has been
on a strict diet of steroids, the lumbering, pounding opener
"Ship of Fools" sets the tone: flatulent bassline, anxious
strings, assaultive beat, frazzled riffage and braying
vocals. Drawing from the band's entire oeuvre and including
new material, the music is severe and punishing. The quieter
interludes don't offer much respite, serving instead as
uneasy, menacing punctuation. One of the record's most
engaging aspects is the way the reconfigured band reinvents
some of the older, most ambitious Van der Graaf Generator
tracks. A 17-minute "Pioneers Over C" and a 14-minute medley
of "A Plague of Lighthouse Keepers" and "The Sleepwalkers"
might not appear to be wholly attractive propositions,
especially in the wake of punk's atomizing influence on song
lengths, but they work exceptionally well. Most impressive
is the rendition of "Still Life." Starting with Hammill
backed only by cello and violin, the track eventually
topples into the sonic maelstrom. The newer songs are
equally successful, especially "Last Frame," which receives
an epic, scorching makeover, and previously unreleased
tracks like the frenzied anti-capitalist screed
"Sci-Finance" and the riff-heavy, metallic "Door." "Nadir's
Big Chance" provides a fitting conclusion. On the song's
original studio version, Hammill's proto-punk alter-ego
Ricky Nadir sounded the death-knell of glam, chiding "all
these jerks in their tinsel-glitter suits"; here he modifies
the lyrics and ups the ante by
labeling punks as "all these jerks in their leather bondage
suits." (Ironically, John Lydon was in the audience.)
Vital is the sound of a band refusing to go quietly,
dying as it lived, in a state of turmoil and cacophony.
While it's a perfectly apposite coda to the group's career,
it's frustrating that this line-up never had the opportunity
to realize its potential on another studio album.

Nearly three decades after World Record, Banton,
Evans, Hammill and Jackson reunited to record
Present. The four had performed together at a couple
of Hammill's solo gigs, as well as at birthday parties for
family members, but a full-fledged reunion had never looked
likely. Nevertheless, the former bandmates' experience of
running into each other with alarming regularity at
ex-roadies' funerals, coupled with Hammill's heart attack in
2004, provided the impetus to revive the group before it was
too late. The resulting album is a two-CD set, the first
disc containing largely song-oriented tracks and the second
featuring a selection of improvised instrumental numbers.
Inevitably, Van der Graaf Generator 2005 doesn't pick up
stylistically where it left off in 1976, and there's no
direct line between Word Record and Present,
but this is still clearly a Van der Graaf Generator record.
All of the characteristic ingredients remain to some degree
(harrowing vocals, squealing horns, off-kilter organ and a
weighty-yet-agile bottom-end), without making the album
sound at all anachronistic. The contemporary feel of many of
the tracks on disc one also resonates in some of the lyrical
themes. Hammill gets his war on for "Every Bloody Emperor,"
a splenetic waltz with both immediate and more universal
historical concerns: "We grieve for the democratic process /
As our glorious leaders conspire to feed us / The last dregs
of imperious disdain / In the new empire's name." Dealing
with less serious matters, albeit just as vituperatively,
"Nutter Alert" is a surging Hammill rant about fools and
having to suffer them  or not. Similarly
tongue-in-cheek, the fevered "Abandon Ship!" (keeping up the
Van der Graaf Generator tradition of nautical- or
maritime-themed songs) looks at aging, apparently casting a
jaundiced eye on the band itself: "It's difficult to think
of anything less magic / Than the aged in pursuit of the
hip." Alongside these more turbulent numbers, "Boleas Panic"
is a sax-driven instrumental with a stately gravitas at
times suggesting "Jerusalem." While a couple of the
improvisations on the second disc test the patience a little
(the reggae dabbling of "Manuelle" strays into "Meurglys
III" territory), it affords a fascinating vista on the
band's creative process and underlines the prowess of
Banton, Evans and Jackson. Musical reunions can be dodgy
prospects at the best of times, but to get together after
almost 30 years apart might seem like sheer madness 
in other words, business as usual for Van der Graaf
Generator. For a comeback record, there's nothing
undignified or embarrassing about it.

Jackson left again in November 2005. A year later,
Banton, Evans and Hammill announced plans to continue as a
trio.

By the time of Van der Graaf's demise in 1978, the band
had only two compilation albums to its name, Charisma's
68-71 (later issued in Germany as Reflection)
and Rock Heavies. The former covered the first three
records and included "The Boat of Millions of Years," B-side
of the 1970 "Refugees" single (originally entitled "The Boat
of a Million Years"), while the latter gathered material
from the Banton-Evans-Hammill-Jackson albums, skipping over
Godbluff. Repeat Performance assembles tracks
from the first four records, adding "The Boat of Millions of
Years" and "w," the B-side of the 1972 single "Theme One."
Time Vaults was the first set of hitherto unreleased
work: billing itself as an "anti-compilation," this is a
rattlebag of rough practice recordings from the period
between Pawn Hearts and Godbluff. Virgin put
together two of the better '80s collections, First
Generation (Scenes from 1969-71) and Second
Generation (Scenes from 1975-1977). The first traces the
group's output from H to He Who Am the Only One to
Pawn Hearts (and includes "Theme One"); the second
picks up with Godbluff and draws on all of the band's
subsequent studio albums. Of little interest is Now and
Then, which incorporates two tracks from Time
Vaults and six numbers from Banton, Evans and Jackson's
Gentlemen Prefer Blues. Virgin's I Prophesy
Disaster attempts a comprehensive overview, omitting
material from H to He Who Am the Only One, World
Record and The Quiet Zone/The Pleasure Dome, and
featuring Vital's medley of "A Plague of Lighthouse
Keepers" and "The Sleepwalkers." Also included are a studio
recording of "Ship of Fools" (previously the B-side of the
France-only single "Cat's Eye"), "The Boat of Millions of
Years" and "w." Maida Vale is the only substantial,
legally available evidence of the
Banton-Evans-Hammill-Jackson line-up outside the studio.
Comprising tracks recorded for BBC Radio between '71 and
'76, it's a good testament to the band's live power,
particularly the renditions of "Darkness (11/11)," "Man-Erg"
and "Scorched Earth." Another rip-off, The Masters,
recycles seven numbers from Time Vaults and cobbles
them together with three Banton, Evans and Jackson tracks
from Gentlemen Prefer Blues.

The Box is a four-CD, 34-track monster that seeks
to combine a "best of" with rarities. Although there are no
album versions of tracks from The Aerosol Grey
Machine (and the presence of "Meurglys III," even in
edited form, is unnecessary), The Box conducts an
adequate tour of Van der Graaf Generator's studio oeuvre.
However, the 14 previously unavailable (legally, at least)
recordings aren't entirely satisfying. Nine performances
captured on BBC sessions between '68 and '77 complement the
Maida Vale material nicely, but the sound quality of
some of these is lacking (for instance, "People You Were
Going To"). On the plus side, the superior fidelity on
tracks from the '77 sessions gives another rare glimpse of
the group's last incarnation with Charles Dickie on cello,
as does an unheard studio version of "Door." The rest of the
rare material consists of four numbers from a 1975 gig in
Rimini, Italy, which has long circulated as a bootleg. These
are excellent live documents (especially "Scorched Earth"),
but the sound quality is poor. The Box also includes a
booklet packed with reminiscences from Banton, Evans,
Hammill, Jackson and Genesis's Tony Banks; a wealth of
photos; and an annotated band chronology/gigography. Having
gone to considerable lengths to assemble this lovely
compendium, the compilers, unfortunately, didn't bother to
proofread it with anything close to the care it merits. An
abbreviated, single-disc companion to The Box was
released as An Introduction: From the Least to the Quiet
Zone.